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Taking advantage of this month, what can you do?
Greetings!
As we enter this last month of the year, I want to encourage you to focus on what things you can do better, what things do you need to eliminate, what things do you need to add. Develop a plan to implement the items you selected under each category. This will give you an incredible start to an uncertain year. One of the most important elements of business growth is to accentuate - focus on what you are doing really well and emphasize that. To read more........
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Protecting What you Have 
What can you do right now to grow your business? What processes can you implement to save or reduce costs? These two questions are great additional questions to help you in answering the questions presented above. As CFR & Associates contemplated those questions, we very quickly realized we needed to do both, and the strategy we implemented did both.
Last week, we talked about a strategy that CFR & Associates is currently using - that of defending what we have and bringing back into our portfolio clients we lost or just got away. We entered the month with an aggressive campaign to keep all of our existing clients and do it regardless of costs. We offered many 50% savings in their coaching investment. Well, after one week, the results are becoming evident. Going after what you already have and keeping it is much easier than attracting new clients, as valuable as they are. But, we sought to strengthen our foundation with this strategy and it is working. As we said last week, if you would like to talk to a coach at CFR & Associates, click here. We offer Complimentary Consultations.
Although we must always attract new clients as well, they are much more difficult to bring into the fold. The whole concept of attracting new customers will be discussed in next week's e-letter.
So, what strategy could you take to preserve what you have? Would it be an aggressive strategy like the one CFR did? Would it be one of adding additional value to your existing base of customers?
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Guest Editorial, Mac Anderson from Simple Truths with some very profound advice
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday morning.
Perhaps it's the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or
maybe it's the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first
few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.
A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a
steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What
began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life
seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:
I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band
on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the
way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a
golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the
broadcasting business. He was telling whomever he was talking with something
about "a thousand marbles." I was intrigued and stopped to listen to
what he had to say.
"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your
job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home
and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work
sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It's too bad you missed your
daughter's dance recital," he continued; "Let me tell you something
that has helped me keep my own priorities." And that's when he began to
explain his theory of a "thousand marbles."
"You see, I sat down one day and did a little
arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some
live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five
years.
Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with
3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their
entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I'm getting to the important part.
It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think
about all this in any detail," he went on, "and by that time I had
lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I
lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So
I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up
having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home
and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack
next to my gear.
Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out
and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused
more on the really important things in life.
There's nothing like watching your time here on this
earth run out to help get your priorities straight.
Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign off with
you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very
last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next
Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can
all use is a little more time.
It was nice to meet you Tom. I hope you spend more time
with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75
year old man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!"
You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this
fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned
to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few
hams to work on the next club newsletter.
Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss.
"C'mon honey, I'm taking you and the kids to breakfast."
"What brought this on?" she asked with a smile.
"Oh, nothing special, it's just been a long time
since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy
store while we're out? I need to buy some marbles."
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Selecting and Retaining Star Employees, the key to Business Growth
Last week we were talking about how companies could conceivably process 600 applications / resumes in an hour and we offered the term - keyword sort.
How do you develop your key words? You pull them right out of the Core Values and experience qualifications you are looking for. We suggested that people can't really make that up, it actually has to be who they were.
Get a FREE STAR REPORT HERE
So, once you have sorted through all of the resumes and applications, how do you determine whether that candidate is right for you or not? That is a good question and it is at this point that many companies make mistakes. The initial tendency is to look at the resume and say this looks good, let's interview them. I want to suggest something else, altogether. Have another person review the resume and then score the highest resumes with a process called the Score Card. Take each Core Value and Experience characteristic and assign it a value of five. Then score the highest qualifying resumes using this process. What you will have now is a systematic process of eliminating people who are not going to fit in your organization anyway.
The next step is to request a time with them on the phone. Have each top scoring resume placed in an appointment pile and schedule a phone interview. Here is where some deadly mistakes can take place. First of all skipping the phone interview and going right to a live interview process will soak up all of your time with candidates you are not going to hire in the first place.
Get my FREE STAR REPORT HERE
Once the phone interview is set - up, it is important to restrict the time spent on it. First of all, the questions should be pre-designed and scripted. Secondly, the interview should not exceed 20 minutes. It doesn't matter how many phone interviews you have, it just matters that they are timed. More on this next week.
Then ask them the questions listening not only for what they say, but how they say it. Can you hear the smile in their voice? Can you hear confidence in their answer? Can you hear a level of expertness and ability in their voice? Can you.....Read more....
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